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Every year on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, we hear snippets of his eloquent “I Have a Dream” speech and see televised scenes from that dramatic gathering on the Washington Mall a half century ago.

Few people, however, pause to ask what kind of speech Dr. King would give today. We act and think as if that dream had somehow come true when he sent those words rolling across the 300,000 people in front of him.

We airbrush the ringing challenge of his speech. Dr. King himself was on a journey to a Promised Land he envisioned, and toward which he tried to point us. That rally, after all, was officially “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” not a march for civil rights only.

That November, Dr. King tied together civil and human rights with economic justice: “Violence has been the inseparable twin of materialism, the hallmark of its grandeur.” Civil rights addressed only the tip of the iceberg. The underlying cause of brutality and psychological violence was an economic system that perpetrated and relied on economic disparity, manipulation and injustice.

We forget that Dr. King also opposed the Vietnam War as unlawful violence that killed poor civilians and soldiers in its wake.

And we seldom recall that, at the time of his death in 1968, he was planning the Poor People's March on Washington and encampment on the mall for economic justice. “We have moved from the era of civil rights to an era of human rights,” he said.

The Poor People's Campaign was a multiracial effort to address poverty by demanding a $30 billion package, including full employment and the annual construction of 500,000 affordable residences.

Nor do we talk about the fact that Dr. King was assassinated while helping poor sanitation workers in Memphis organize a union.

Were Dr. King alive today, he would work to overturn the Supreme Court Citizens United decision, contesting efforts to suppress voting in minority and poor communities, trying to reverse the re-segregation of our schools, and opposing drone attacks on foreign civilian populations.

If he were here today, he would excoriate a Congress, half of which comprises millionaires, for not raising the minimum wage to a living wage, letting unemployment insurance expire for displaced workers, and closing its eyes to a tax code that rewards the wealthy. He also would raise his prophetic voice against the aggrandizement of wealth by 1 percent of the country and the enormous executive salaries earned on the backs of everyday families — one of the worst economic mal-distributions in our history.

That is the challenge of this holiday: not the pious renditions of his 1963 speech, but a solid commitment to doing everything in our power to change economic structures so they are more just and fair, rather than forcing people to bear the scourge of a system that oppresses them.